[This post and the others on this topic was written on paper in fragments or even less – single word prompts for ideas – at the time of the events – and assembled later. It's taken a while to put things together… not through any particular emotional difficulty but just lacking the energy and willpower to do much in the weeks right after the surgery, in addition to a certain perfectionism with respect to the project which I've now managed to finally abandon.]
First Shift Word: Joy
Emerging from the haze of anaesthesia, my coworker Helen was there with my doctor to welcome me among the living. My only feeling was happiness to find myself still among the living.
My surgery had concluded at about 7 pm or so – my understanding is that lasted well over 9 hours, total. During my entire time in the ICU, I did not have easy visual access to a clock, and knowing the time seemed, anyway, to be the least of my worries.
Life in the ICU is divided into shifts, and the shift changes are huge happenings – the cycle of life in the ICU is entirely by shift. Nevertheless, the lack of access to a clock for the first part and my own fuzzy-headedness for the second part meant that for the longest time, I couldn't figure out if there were 4 shifts in a day or 3. In retrospect, I'm sure now that it's 3, and since my overall stay in the ICU was just short of 48 hours, I experienced a total of 6 shifts. I will write about each shift separately, as the character of the shift varied according to the character of the nurse attending to me more than according to any progress or change or landmark in my own body or its recovery.
So…
That first shift, I can't in fact remember the nurse's face. After my initial wake up and short talk with Helen and Dr Ryu, I remember almost nothing. I was overwhelmed. I couldn't "feel" my own body in large swathes, and I didn't realize, for example, just how many tubes I had attached to me and how they all worked until well into my second shift in the ICU.
One example was the fact of my catheterization: I simply didn't know, and no one thought to tell me, probably because they thought I knew or that it didn't matter. The thing is, I felt this strong need to pee, but I kept "holding it" – not really, as I later found out, but I managed the sensation of "holding it," and when I mentioned the need to pee to a nurse all anyone ever said was "it's OK," which really didn't make sense to me until I realized my catheterization.
In the end, lying there feeling helpless and frusrated and overwhelmed, my emotional response was unexpected: simple joy. "I'm still alive. That's cool." I repeated it over and over, and there was little else going on in my mind.
Update, 2016-03-06: I was going through old files on my computer and found this photo – I don't think it's ever been posted on this blog but it should be, for completeness' sake. It is the first picture taken of me after my surgery, by coworker Helen when she came to see me in the ICU.
